Digital Commerce 360, a leading media and research organization that delivers news and competitive data across e-retailing, B2B ecommerce, and digital healthcare, recently interviewed Royal Brass and Hose about their progress in digital.
A path forward informed by customers
The first step in our engagement with this client was customer research. At Ntara, we believe that every website—particularly ecommerce—should begin on a solid foundation of data and analytics.
For Royal Brass & Hose, we found that their customers enjoyed the personal touch provided by their assigned sales reps, but they wanted a website that made ordering simpler and easier. They also wanted a more intuitive product search to speed selection and ordering.
Planning for a powerful ecosystem
We helped this client analyze the changing digital landscape, industry trends, and their internal processes to better understand the opportunity for digital expansion in the distribution market.
We created them a custom roadmap recommending technology upgrades for the website and beyond. Our data showed that these upgrades would set their business up for imminent product line scalability and platform flexibility.
New platform, new plug-ins
Because the client wanted their website to work harder for them, they replaced their existing platform with a .NET based technology stack. With this infrastructure, they could select valuable plug-ins that were not available on other technology systems.
They selected ecommerce engine Virto Commerce for its .NET base, platform flexibility, and B2B ecommerce feature set.
inriver PIM
The inriver PIM system gives them the ability to manage their product information in a single source of truth. This ensures the product data is accurate, up-to-date, and consistent across sales channels.
In the past, Royal Brass & Hose had issues maintaining accurate product data; sales reps and customer service reps often relied on printed product catalogs with varying information. Now, that’s a thing of the past. Thanks to inriver PIM, sales reps have access to the latest and greatest product data to better serve their customers.
Elastic search
Another main goal in developing this strong digital ecosystem was to provide an intuitive search function for customers. Elastic was identified as the best solution because it enabled their customers to find products by very particular specifications.
Although Royal Brass & Hose is happy with the new site search, the work is never done. They continue to customize and tweak this functionality to produce the most relevant and useful outputs for customers.
Avalara
Avalara is a sales tax processing software that helps Royal Brass & Hose better manage sales tax duties online. Built into the Virto Commerce platform, this solution reduces regulatory risk and ensures price transparency online.
Want to learn more?
For more information on their digital transformation—both online and offline—check out the Digital Commerce 360 article.